The "boxbgcolor" parameter to the GrayBoxPainter is being ignored due to bugs in the code. It is unclear how long it has been broken, but this prevents developers from having firm control over the look of their applet deployments, in particular while the applet is being downloaded. There are also problems with the boxfgcolor specification, in particular where it does not apply to the error message's text if an error occurred while the applet was being loaded.